Adamson
Gallery is proud to present an exhibit of photography by Gordon Parks, one of
the twentieth century’s foremost documentarians of American life. This
exhibition features a selection of images from Segregation Story, Parks’s powerful 1956 photographic series, which
documented an extended African American family in segregated Alabama.
Originally commissioned for a September 1956 issue of Life Magazine, this
series is an intimate portrayal of one family’s perseverance through racial and
economic subjugation in the Jim Crow South.

Gordon
Parks began his career at Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration (FSA),
working alongside Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others, while capturing
African-American life in Washington DC. After a stint working for the Office of
War Administration and other federal agencies, Parks moved onto New York and
Harlem in 1944 where he worked both as a fashion photographer for Vogue and for
Life magazine, displaying the remarkable breadth of his talent. At Life, Parks
produced striking photographic essays of subjects ranging from racial
segregation to celebrities like Duke Ellington and Marilyn Monroe. Aside from
his photography, Parks was simultaneously a writer, filmmaker, and music
composer; he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree (1963),
along with several volumes of poetry and memoirs, directed the film Shaft
(1971), including its sequel, and co-founded Essence magazine in the 1970s.
Parks died in 2006 at the age of 93.

In 1956,
Parks was sent on assignment to Mobile, Alabama for a September 1956 Life
Magazine photo essay titled, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” depicting one multigenerational
African American family’s adversity through segregation. He focused on Mr. and
Mrs. Alfred Thornton, 82, and 70, and their nine children and 19 grandchildren
of the related Causey and Tanner families, who lived near Mobile and Shady Grove,
Alabama. The images illustrate what appears to be a fragment of a simple life
in bucolic Alabama, yet the photographs display a more compassionate and
poignant story of struggle and survival through oppressive restrictions forced
on black families living within the confines of Jim Crow laws in the South. To
Parks, the life of the Thorntons was all too familiar, having endured
segregation and discrimination, growing up impoverished in Fort Scott, Kansas.
As a reaction to his experience of injustice, Parks has said: “I picked up a
camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the
universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.” Parks was the magazine’s first African
American staff photographers.

Most
journalistic photographs of the time captured the crusade for civil rights with
images of demonstrations, brutalities, and racial inequalities. Parks’s
approach was entirely different, serving as crucial documentation in a prosaic
yet profound way. His photographs were meant to challenge the perception of
racism and to elicit empathy; to show that the Thornton Family were like any
other family, except marginalized because of the color of their skin. While
twenty-six photographs were eventually published in Life Magazine, most of the
photographs from Parks’s assignment were presumed lost for decades. In 2012, The Gordon Parks Foundation
unearthed more than two hundred color negatives containing the full series,
hidden in the basement of their archives. Many of the photographs from Segregation Story are on view for the
first time in over half a century.